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How I Met Your Mother easily stands out above the crowd of sitcoms and comedies. It's intelligent, thoughtful, funny and incredibly well thought out. I decided to learn what makes it tick.

Background

We've recently been watching How I Met Your Mother and it's had an impact on us. While it got off to a slow start with neither me nor my wife being that convinced we'd continue watching, we're now hooked after a few episodes. Part of me always analyses anything I like, trying to understand what makes it likeable or what makes it better or different than something else.

Likeable Characters

All of the characters are likeable, no matter how hideous some of their traits are, each and every character shows their weaknesses and vulnerabilities at some point in the series. Even the awesome Barney has his down and self-doubting moments. It's what makes us human. The more human the characters, the more we can connect with them.

Real Characters, Normal Traits

I know at least one person like each of the characters in the series. Actually, some people have many of the traits. Even though some of the characters are a bit extreme in their traits, I've know people who are further out there than that. Compare this to Friends, I didn't know anybody that had those traits. I think Chandler was the most believable, maybe Ross was, but if I'd known a Ross, I'd have avoided getting to know him well enough to see that he matched the character. Also if I compare this to the UK comedy of Shameless, I find that the characters are still more believable. I've seen the character traits in Shameless in many people but not consistently. Someone may venture into that territory for a while and then return to their normal character. In HIMYM, it's consistent.

People are central

I watched the first series wondering what Barney did for a living. In a way, it didn't matter. Whereas some sitcoms and dramas have the situation as the central theme - think of The IT Crowd, Red Dwarf, CSI - it really doesn't matter what the situation is for HIMYM. You could put the characters anywhere and the premise would still work. In this case, they're a group of 20-30 somethings living in New York. They don't even seem that closely linked at the beginning.

We watched one episode where the story took place in the usual bar. What we noticed is that characters didn't move from the bar throughout the whole episode. True, the episode did show flashbacks of the characters' memories. But featuring an episode on one (non-eventful) location and making it successful shows a lot of talent and skill in the script-writing. To make it work, they brought people back to being central.

"How I Met Your Mother - Seasons 1-3" (Twentieth Century Fox)

Recurrent themes

Every good drama or sit-com has themes that crop up from one episode to the next. Not just the character traits, but also the events around them. Similar to Friends, HIMYM has relationships, weddings, proposals (including false proposals), breaks and a whole lot more. Does Marshall take the job or not, how does it make him feel? How many wingmen does Barney have? Where do his rules come from?

Re-appearing Jokes

This is an extension to the Recurrent Themes idea above in that a joke is set-up to occur in a later episode as everything culminates. The show can feature a bit part of one person who is innocently involved in one episode, but in a later episode you find that their activity was a key part of the story as it unfolds. I won't give examples here because they'd be spoilers.

Background

You have to watch the background. Often the clue to what's happening is in the background. Again, spot the pineapple. Some of these are the re-appearing jokes.

Different Perspectives/Sequential Progression/Set-up/Denouement

Wow, this is what I think differentiates How I Met Your Mother from most other series. It's the complexity and deftness of script-writing that has enabled many episodes to start with one perspective and then to relay the story through the different perspectives of other characters. This is an old trick and was shown well in One Night at McCools. But whereas in One Night at McCools, each character had a very different version of the events (e.g. who was tempting who), HIMYM often has the same scene but it adds up to a different story from the different perspectives. That's clever. The whole different perspectives is incredibly difficult to get right once and remain watchable, let alone doing it every 5th or so episode and still keep it fresh. The production team change the methods each time. Sometimes, it plays forwards, sometimes backwards, sometimes you see both in parallel (similar to the split-screen method from 24), sometimes the same words are used but in different contexts. This all takes skill. Hats off to the script-writers for this. Even after seeing several of these episodes, this feature is not a gimmick.

"How I Met Your Mother - Season 1" (20th Century Fox)

Catch-Phrases